Buy & Hold may turn out to be a profitable approach if you intend to hold forever. But we don't live forever, and most people are going to want to sell their investments at some point before forever hits. It's small comfort to know that if you hold your investments for another 20 years, they will make money-especially if you're retired and want to take a cruise next month.

3. Staying Course.

It takes a strong stomach to hang on to an investment when you see it disappearing before your very eyes. Or even when it's up one day and down next. (Like these days, for example.) And once you decide that having to wait for three decades before your investment gets back to square one is not such a great deal, what happens to your Buy & Hold strategy then? It's out window and all you're holding is bag. The much emptier bag.

So what's an investor to do, especially an investor who's really not a professional? For one thing, find a reliable method of gaining information. One that I like is a trend analysis approach that objectifies market behavior. This type of approach is more kinetic in that it doesn't rely on past performance-it relies on past and present performance to indicate a "trend" toward future performance. While that's not infallible in any sense of word, it is a broader range of information than most guides.

Using one of those as a foundation for your strategy, determine a buy point and, most importantly, a sell point for any investment you make. Get comfortable with taking small losses before they turn into big disasters.

There is always risk in investing. However there are ways to minimize risk so you become an investor, not merely a gambler with high hopes for a Buy & Hold approach that many people have now found to have failed them.

The downside of all of this for funds is that sometimes a fund touted as hot one to be in attracts so much investment attention (i.e., money) that it grows beyond its original intention. At that point, it loses its direction and very thing that made it strong is sacrificed. And guess what happens to performance?

So, in midst of all hawking and hype for this fund or that, what's an investor to do to make intelligent choices?

For myself and my clients I use a trend tracking methodology, which identifies long-term trends in various markets. I research funds for stability and reliability as well as current performance. Then, when our trend indicator signals a Buy, we select our mutual funds based on momentum figures for various time periods to arrive at most promising fund(s) to use for this cycle.

This gives us a head start and sometimes, weeks after we've bought a fund, I see it written up in financial papers as being one of best performers.

Does this approach always put us in number one fund? Maybe not. But we are almost always in funds that are doing very, very well. And do we get in at bottom and out at very top? Again, maybe not.

However, I can tell you that, using this methodology, my clients and I followed sell signal we got in October, 2000, and were safely invested in solid money markets when stock market crashed and burned.

Is this approach for you? It depends on how much adrenaline rush you like when you watch your investments. Personally, I fulfill my thrill quotient with other things in life and enjoy sleeping at night when it comes to my investments.